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ARISTOTLE POLITICS BK II CH 3 1261B

"that which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it. Every one thinks chiefly of his own, hardly at all of the common interest; and only when he is himself concerned as an individual. For besides other considerations, everybody is more inclined to neglect the duty which he expects another to fulfill"

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And in Germany a protest against the authoritarian Berlin government unequalled in scale and drawing support from all sections of society, has ended with an unparelleled victory. It is true that the nuclear waste which was the immediate focus of the protest finally reached its destination in Gorleben this morning. But what happened in the preceding 48 hours has changed the political landscape.

The Berlin academic Klaus Hurrelmann said the protests were a “spark from which a new political movement can grow.“

How long until a new political movement is born that gives a voice to the people and restores their freedom and rights?

„There is a feeling that those on top just do whatever they want and consider the people to be stupid. We won’t put up with that. We’re going to get involved,“ sociologist Dieter Rucht said, summing up the feeling of the people of Germany.

The police operation against the protestors in Wendland went on for more than two days and night without a break. It took two days and nights for the police to beat clear a path for the transport of nuclear waste to a depot in Gorleben, northern Germany.

The police had to fight for every inch of the railway track, for every inch of the road, for every crossing and for every track through the woods. No one took a step back. And if the police finally cleared the last 4,000 protestors this morning from the road to allow the convoy of trucks laden with Castor containers to trundle into Gorleben depot, it was only because there were a staggering 20,000 police officers, hundreds of police cars, helicopters, mounted police deployed.

But not even the sheer numbers would have been enough in the face of such determined, organised and creative resistance. The police literally had to beat the protestors out of the way and they did so with incredible brutality.

Medical personnel treating injured activists were themselves beaten by the police, reported Gabriele Pelce. Police even stopped medics bringing a woman in Leitstade whose leg had been broken to hospital, forcing her to lie in agony in the freezing cold. Protestors who had climbed a tree where brought down with tear gas and beaten with batons when they fell to the ground. At least 1000 people suffered injuries. The brutality of the police seemed to know no bounds Fingers were smashed with blows. Faces bled from punches to the head.

The police chiefs clearly reckoned that no civilians could or would withstand the assaults with batons, pepper spray and the tear gas, or stand up to such punishment. They thought that the people – school children, students, the elderly protesting on behalf of their children at work– would crack under the relentless harrassment, the threats of arrest and imprisonment, the freezing cold, the tear gas, batons, horses, helicopters, water cannon, dogs as well as the relentless glare of the floodlights that made the wood as bright as day at midnight.

But everyone stood their ground and now the whole country talks about the protestors with deep respsect – a respect that no single politician has been talked about for years.

At stake was not just the nuclear policy of the government, rejected by the overwhelming majority of the people and profiting just a handful of corporations. At stake was the whole issue of whether Germany is still a democracy in which the government follows the will of the people or an authoritarian police state run by corporations and banks for their profit.

As in Stuttgart it was the ordinary people who came out in force to defend democracy. In Stuttgart, it was the students, schoolchildren, the elderly, teachers, doctors, the farmers, lawyers, artists who stood up against particular corporate interests and corrupt politicians.

The protests in Wendland mark another high water mark. Again, ordinary people turned out in force to defend democracy and the principles of freedom with unflinching determination and courage.

The police lashed out wildly at protestors. Yet it was the police who became exhausted and who broke down sooner, their morale in shreds, their nerves worn out. It was the police who ended up discredited for fighting for the coporations like hired mercenaries.

Even Konrad Freiberg from the police union GdP today attacked the decision by Chancellor Angela Merkel to push through the extension of nuclear energy in spite of a legally binding agreement to phase it out as ”a highpoint of fatal political paths of error.”

“It was a huge political error to unilaterally cancel the consensus on nuclear energy that had been formed with so much difficulty,” he said.

Freiberg accused the government of pushing the police into the role of “those who help accomplish the retention of power by politicians.”

He said that the “intransparent, contradictory politics of the government that appears one-sided and favourable [to corporations]” is driving citizens “rightly” onto the streets.

There was something really awe inspiring and amazing in the willingness of so many people from all walks of life to stand together and work together for the common good. Five Greenpeace activists held up the transport by road for hours yesterday by chaining themselves to a steel pipe in the road inside a lorry. Four farmers chained themselves to a pyramid. Every part of wendland, every village, every farm, every inn, every shop became a unit in the line of defence, and bore the brunt of the attack by the corporate-controlled government on the fundamental principles of a democratic state and yet their hearts and nerves did not fail them. 600 tractors skillfully repulsed the advancing columns of water cannon trucks and police cars bringing reinforcements. Other farmers drove sheep and goats onto the road to block the police. The local post office set up a branch close to the main base of the resistance and helped people to send postcards. These were the kind of people that stood in the line of the main attack.

None of the people will be the same again. Germany will surely never be the same again. Their intelligent, creative and effective resistance will never be forgotten.

The protestors showed an astonishing good humour, courage and powers of endurance, singing songs, playing music, sharing food and blankets, buoyed by bonds of solidarity and support from the general public. Thanks to intelligent organisation and logistics, they created in the bleak and muddy woods, turning gold in autumn, an efficient and homely camp with a field kitchen, a pizza oven, and hot soup. There they planned their blockades, pouring over maps, communicating with the world via sms, ready to fight for freedom with an unshakeable committement, incredible resourcefulness and a a readiness for sacrifice that was amazing.

Anyone has had to sleep outside for even one night in subzero temperatures in the rain will understand what spending 48 hours outdoors in the muddy woods of northern Germany means. And then, on top of that, to have to face the massed ranks of the police, see the horses and hear the thuds of the truncheons, the shouts, and with hardly any sleep.

Their protest capturing the imagination and sympathy of the general public has left the government even more isolated and the corproate clique who run the country, whose leading figures belong to bizarre little freemason lodges with eccentric beliefs in some super race that they do not belong to if there were ever such a thing, and who rely on the brute force of the police, and on brainwashing by the the controlled media to push through their agenda in a very precarious position.

The defense of democracy and freedom has come not from the political parties, not from organisation such as Amnesty Internation. This defense againt the globalist totalitarian agenda has come from the ordinary people, who mobilised, who came out onto the streets, and who would not be beaten and intimidated.

The ordinary people were ready to brave the cold and rain, to walk for kilometres through woods, to be beaten by police, and to raise their banners over and over again after they were ripped from their hands, to be assualted with pepper spray, freeze in the night time, sit in blockades, to endure spartan conditions for freedom. Conscious of the risks, knowing the dangers they would face, they had come well prepared, wearing thick clothes, bringing sleeping backs, practising blockades for the time when the police would “lift them”.

The courage and friendly concern of the protestors as they faced the clatter of boots, the thuds of the truncheons, the sound of helicopters high up in the night car, the sirens of police cars has proven so effective that they have brought the police state to its knees. Together these people repulsed the concerted attempt by the corporations to leverage the police forces to ram through their take over of the political structures and economy and establish a Germany where the people are to work and pay taxes, to fight in the armies and kill and be killed for the profits of the corporations and have absolutely no say.

The police know better than anyone how stubbornly the people resisted. The people had to be dragged away into camps, refusing to walk inspite of the fact that they could have walked away and gone home. Thy preferred to spend the night in subzero temperatures out in the open in an improvised prison surrounded by police vehicles than to get to their feet on the orders of the police. They preferred to sleep in the mud and frost in blankets and with no waste or food and suffer hypothermia than to march on the orders of the police. These were people who were ready to endure yet another night in the freezing cold rather than give up to the authoritarian police state.

It is a moot question where so much courage, community spirit and strength was forged. A glance at Tacitus’s book Germania gives a clue. He describes the tribes inhabiting northern Germany in a way that would seem to fit the protestors.

„A region so vast, the Chaucians do not only possess but fill; a people of all the Germans the most noble, such as would rather maintain their grandeur by justice than violence. They live in repose, retired from broils abroad, void of avidity to possess more, free from a spirit of domineering over others. They provoke no wars, they ravage no countries, they pursue no plunder. Of their bravery and power, the chief evidence arises from hence, that, without wronging or oppressing others, they are come to be superior to all. Yet they are all ready to arm, and if an exigency require, armies are presently raised, powerful and abounding as they are in men and horses; and even when they are quiet and their weapons laid aside, their credit and name continue equally high,” Tacitus wrote 2000 years ago.